My attempts at learning Chinese

As my previous post may have hinted, my Chinese-language skills are next to nothing.  (I think) they say you need only know around 3,000 characters to read a Chinese newspaper - I can recognise less than ten!  But as I’ve only been learning Mandarin formally for around eighteen months, perhaps I should cut myself some slack.  I’m never going to reach an adequate level of fluency - starting to learn a new language at the age of 29 is really difficult, and it’s not like I have a natural aptitude for languages anyway.  I’ll be happy if, in a year’s time I can just about get the gist of a slogan on a propaganda poster (I can already recognise the character for people (ren)!) and perhaps, write basic sentences in characters.   Watch this space!

Revolutionary trance music

This is quite bizarre.  Found it via Free Albums Galore while ‘tag surfing’ China. Ostensibly the people behind ‘Red Unit‘ are Chinese and sampling revolutionary music dating from the Cultural Revolution. But the discussion on Global Noise Offline suggests this is actually a Japanese project.  So, why the subterfuge?  Why pretend to be Chinese?  Is it satire?  Is it commie kitsch?  Is it youthful (if misguided) enthusiasm for ‘the revolution’?  Either way, a really interesting appropriation of the material culture of revolutionary China, especially coming from Japan, given the current poor state of relations between the two nations.

My first task…

…is to consolidate all the useful links and bookmarks I’ve collected over the past eighteen months in one place.  I’m adding them (slowly) to a separate page (’web resources’ - see right-hand sidebar).  They’re not organised or categorised in any way, at the moment.  Hopefully, if I get time in the near future, I’ll be able to sort them into categories.  At present, I’m just keen to get them all in one place so that I can keep on top of them all.  It’s so easy to lose or forget about really useful web resources and until now they’ve been very unsatisfactorily filed in my (rather chaotic) mind.  This job - though long and tedious - should free up a bit of brain space for philosophising and sounding clever. 

And when I’ve done that, my next task will be to beautify my template.  Or, at the very least, ‘red’ theme it!

Cogs and Wheels

The name of this blog, Cogs and Wheels, comes from a 1942 quote from Mao Zedong, about the central importance of art and design for the revolution:

 In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines.  There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics.  Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine’.

Welcome to…

…my brand new blog.  I’ve been thinking about blogging my research for a while now, and finally decided to take the plunge.  For those that do not already know something about me, I am a second year PhD student of Museum Studies, based in the Department of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.  My research is looking at how the material culture of the Cultural Revolution has been collected, interpreted and displayed in contemporary British museums, and how this challenges or reflects the wider image of China in the popular consciousness.

Inspired by other research bloggers like Mary Stevens and Lynn Bethke, I intend to use this blog to collect my thoughts, chart my progress and organise useful sources as I find them.  I suspect my approach will be quite rambling at times, and I doubt that I will make any really incisive breakthroughs (and if I do, I probably won’t blog ‘em just in case my ideas get nicked!), but this blog is - first and foremost - a tool to facilitate the writing of my thesis, which may - as a happy coincidence - make for interesting reading.